This week I wanted to dive into another face commander from Commander 2021 — Breena, the Demagogue, from the appropriately named Silverquill Statement deck.
If you’ve seen Breena out in the wild of Commander tables near you, you’ll know that it does indeed make a statement, which isn’t surprising given StarCityGames.com’s very own Sheldon Menery had a hand in creating the deck during his stint on Magic’s Vision Design team. If you haven’t read about his adventures inside Wizards of the Coast (WotC) — Sharper Style, Sharper Wit: Studying Silverquill’s Impact on Commander — be sure you check it out!
Now Breena looks like a relatively simple design as a three-mana 1/3 Bird Warlock with flying and a one-sentence rules text. But there’s a lot going on there, so let’s take a look at the Release Notes regarding the card:
Breena’s triggered ability will trigger even if you control no creatures.
You choose which creature to put +1/+1 counters on as the ability is resolving. Once you make the choice, no player may take actions until the counters are placed.
That first sentence from the perspective of Breena’s controller helps boil down what can be a little confusing when trying to suss out who can attack which player to get the benefit from Breena’s trigger. When watching Breena being played, the controller will often just explain the situation during each player’s turn since life totals can change and where you can attack with benefit is fluid. As an opponent from the Breena player, I’ve found it useful to just mentally walk carefully through the text box each turn. I imagine as time goes on, we’ll all get more used to playing with and against Breena, but there aren’t many cards out there like it.
The second sentence is a little weird, but it’s there to clarify once the trigger goes on the stack it’ll resolve even if your creatures get killed, bounced, or exiled at instant speed.
That last sentence really improves the ability since no one has a chance to “fizzle” the effect by killing the creature you’re going to put the counters on. They need to choose what creature to kill before the ability resolves and, assuming you still have another creature out there, you can put the +1/+1 counters on it.
I’d like to make a general point about playing Breena before we dig into the details. The first few times I saw Breena played, it got cast early on and people were quick to take advantage of the ability to draw extra cards. But then a funny thing happened: the controller kept putting +1/+1 counters on Breena, and by the time the turn came back around it had gone from one to seven power. The game quickly had to shift into “One of us is going to die quickly, so can anyone kill Breena?”
I personally trained just about every stitch of pinpoint removal I could draw to keep Breena off the battlefield, and it made both me and my opponent frustrated. Afterwards, I wondered, “Is Breena just too busted as a commander?” The answer of course is no: you just have to play it differently. I feel that the best way to play Breena is to spread your +1/+1 counters around to other creatures, and if one of them starts to get threatening and eats a removal spell, well, you’ve still got little 1/3 Breena out there handing out benefits for attacking your opponents. Which means, to my mind, you probably don’t run Breena onto the battlefield until you’ve deployed a few other creatures first.
With that, let’s dig into what cards are going to work well either inside a Breena commander deck or alongside Breena in the 99!
Modular
What immediately springs to mind is that Breena’s ability works great with creatures that already have +1/+1 counters, and the most iconic bunch of creatures with +1/+1 counters are those with the modular ability. These are particularly nice since if one of them suffers an untimely death, you may transfer its counters to another artifact creature. This is awesome if you want to build one huge artifact monster but don’t want to lose everything to a Naturalize. Arcbound Crusher is a great target for Breena due to its inherent trample ability.
+1/+1 counters
Outside of modular artifact creatures, the pool of creatures that enter the battlefield with +1/+1 counters or can add them to themselves is deep and wide. WotC seems to go to this well with every expansion set with no slowdown in sight, and you build lots of different approaches and color combinations. Even with Breena as your commander and limited to just two colors, there are going to be good creatures that don’t make the cut because there are just not enough card slots to handle them all.
In the list above I tried to illustrate what I think are some of the best choices, but make sure you explore your favorite card database and see what jumps out at you. I particularly like the creatures with outlast from the Khans of Tarkir block that provide abilities to each of your creatures with +1/+1 counters like Abzan Falconer and Mer-Ek Nightblade.
